Routledge Handbook of South Asian Politics

India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal

Paul R. Brass

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415434294
• eBook ISBN: 9781134078578
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Routledge Handbook of South Asian Politics examines key issues in politics of the five independent states of the South Asian region: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. Written by experts in their respective areas, this Handbook introduces the reader to the politics of South Asia by presenting the prevailing agreements and disagreements in the literature.

In the first two sections, the Handbook provides a comprehensive introduction to the modern political history of the states of the region and an overview of the independence movements in the former colonial states. The other sections focus on the political changes that have occurred in the postcolonial states since independence, as well as the successive political changes in Nepal during the same period, and the structure and functioning of the main governmental and non-governmental institutions, including the structure of the state itself (unitary or federal), political parties, the judiciary, and the military. Further, the contributors explore several aspects of the political process and political and economic change, especially issues of pluralism and national integration, political economy, corruption and criminalization of politics, radical and violent political movements, and the international politics of the region as a whole.

This unique reference work provides a comprehensive survey of the state of the field and is an invaluable resource for students and academics interested in South Asian Studies, South Asian Politics, Comparative Politics and International Relations.

1
Introduction

Paul R. Brass

Part 1: Colonialism, nationalism, and Independence in South Asia: India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka

The states of the South Asian region are often thought to have shared a common colonial experience through British rule and/or dominance, which has since profoundly influenced their political trajectories. Most notably, from a political standpoint, is the adherence, at least in form, and in some measure in actuality as well, of the leaders and the public in India and Sri Lanka to the basic principles of parliamentary rule through competitive elections, and the repeated striving, less successfully in the other states, towards the same end. Yet, it should be obvious by now that the differences in these respects are profound. First of all, of the five independent states in the South Asian region, only three—India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka—arrived at Independence through a transfer of power from the British. A fourth, Bangladesh, achieved its Independence only a quarter century later after a traumatic civil war that left countless numbers of its citizens dead. As for Nepal, it never experienced direct British rule and has followed a quite different trajectory in the 55 years since its termination. Bhutan, touched on only very briefly in this volume, has remained an independent protectorate of India.

So, the differences are profound, but, at the same time, the striving for open politics, civil liberties, and parliamentary rule has remained alive, active, and renewable in every state in the region.The similarities and differences in these and every other respect are brought out in every section of this volume, which has been organized to encourage comparison. With regard to most topics, the differences among the several countries are so great that a separate chapter on each topic has been required. In other cases, where there are important similarities or where differences have arisen despite a common heritage, the relevant topics have been analyzed in comparative chapters.

With regard to the transition from British rule to Independence, Chapter 2 (Talbot) addresses directly the similarities and differences in the inheritances and legacies that derive from British rule, the nationalist movement, and the partition of the subcontinent. Among those inheritances and legacies, the catastrophe of Partition that occurred simultaneously with the achievement of Independence for both states stands out. It remains a living legacy that has affected both the internal development and the external relations of both states, persistently endangering the peace of the region and retarding its common development. It is a common legacy, but even here there is a profound difference in its meaning for the two countries. For India, Partition destroyed the dream of its leaders for a unified subcontinent. For Pakistan, Partition signified freedom from Indian and Hindu dominance.

Also profound were the differences in the nationalist movement that brought Independence to each country upon the withdrawal of the British. In this case, there are three trajectories: the non-violent Congress movement built over three quarters of a century on the base of a strong, nearly subcontinent-wide organization and led by Mohandas K. Gandhi during the quarter century preceding Independence; the militant Pakistan movement led by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, with a history of a mere decade of organization, and with very weak roots in the politically dominant, western parts of the country; and the peaceful granting of Independence to Ceylon that limited the building of a strong nationalist movement.

Further, the nationalist movements in the three countries suffered from different degrees of noninclusiveness. The Indian National Congress, the broadest of the three, did not have equal strength in all regions of the country, and had little or none in some. Pakistan, of course, was created out of two entirely different cultural regions, united only nominally by the predominance of Islam in both. Moreover, within the western region of the country as well, as in India, there were major regional, cultural, and ethnic differences. Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) arrived at Independence with a thin veneer of elite cooperation—which soon collapsed—among the predominant Sinhala population; the minority, regionally concentrated Tamil population; and yet another minority group of Tamils of relatively recent South Indian origin, most of whom the new government promptly sought to disenfranchise and expel from the country.

At the same time, all three countries arrived at Independence with shared commitments to slogans of “democracy” and “secularism,” although they differed on other fundamentals. The latter included, for example, the centrality of the state in development: greatest in India; least in Sri Lanka where the state commitment was not to development in the Indian sense, but, as Wickramasinghe notes in Chapter 3, to “social welfare”; and Pakistan, lacking any ideology of state development, rather more concerned with building an army capable of confronting India as needed. But, all states in the South Asian region, in common with most states everywhere, share an unshakable determination to retain at all costs the boundaries bequeathed to them at Independence in the face of several movements demanding separation. Only in the case of Pakistan—and there only because of the intervention of India— has the division of a South Asian state occurred.

Moreover, in all states in the region, the original commitment to secularism as an ideology has been battered and largely displaced with the rise of Hindu nationalism in India, recognition of Islam as the state religion and the rise of Islamic movements in Pakistan, and Buddhist demands for official recognition in Sri Lanka, accepted soon after Independence. Gellner, however, notes that: “Nepal, on the other hand, which was an officially Hindu state from 1962 to 2006, has, with the establishment of a secular republic, gone in the other direction.”¹

Part II: Political change, political parties, and the issue of unitary vs federal forms of government

India

In the years since Independence, dramatic changes have taken place, affecting all the countries of the region in substantially different ways. India has passed from a political order dominated by the Indian National Congress through a brief period of emergency authoritarian rule under Indira Gandhi to a functioning multiparty system. Moreover, all these periods have been marked by intense political activity, involving an array of political parties across the entire spectrum of ideological differences in competitive elections based on universal franchise, with large voter turnouts in virtually every election. India, it can be safely said, has long ago passed the conventional tests of a stable, functioning democracy, namely, frequent passing of power to alternative political formations, complete and unchallenged civilian control over the military, and massive popular participation in electoral politics. Moreover, the forms of party mobilization and popular participation have been distinctive in India, building on and extending the many forms of nonviolent protest against government policies and actions that were developed during the movement for Independence. Further, these developments have also been accompanied by the gradual incorporation of the middle and lower castes into the electoral process and, in recent years, the capture of political power in several states by parties based on their support.

These changes have been brought about through the agency of vibrant, but highly fragmented, political parties and the struggles for power among them, in the course of which both the predominant parties and the relations among them have changed dramatically. The national one-party dominant system under the Indian National Congress prevailed from Independence until the late 1980s, since when it has been replaced by a multiparty system reshaped into a three-front, but dual coalitional system with the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) the principal protagonists.The rise of the militant Hindu party, the BJP, has been the driving force in this competitive realignment.

But the national system is not simply replicated in the several states. Rather, most state party systems have a distinctive character. Indian politics at both state and national levels also have adapted to various forms of coalition politics (Virginia Van Dyke, in Chapter 5) on which there is an increasing literature. At the same time, there has been a general movement in most states towards forms of bipolar competition, that is to say, predominantly two party or two front.

Beneath the veneer of conventional parliamentary democracy in India lie several other features: a political-electoral order increasingly based on money and muscle in which the primary aim of most elected representatives is to gain control over public institutions in order to enrich themselves; in many states also, a further degradation of the political order through the outright criminalization of politics; the move away from nonviolent protest movements to mobilizations that lead to considerable violence, often intended;² the continued, indeed in some ways increased reliance of politicians on what Harriss (Chapter 4) calls the social “identities of caste and religion” to garner votes; and, most importantly, the still limited ability of the vast population of miserably poor people to benefit from the political process, even to achieve a measure of dignity and self-respect.

The literature on electoral politics in India is fast becoming one of the richest in the world that elucidates the great changes that have taken place in popular participation and the composition of the electorate.³ Not only has there been a considerable increase in the voting population (with variations over time and from state to state), but whole new groups of voters have been incorporated into electoral politics through a process that I have described elsewhere as “caste succession.”⁴ Whereas, in the early years after Independence, upper castes dominated as candidates and voters (often bringing their lower caste dependents along with them), the “backward” and “lower” castes now are well represented by persons from their own groups and dominate state governments in many of the Indian states. Moreover, despite occasional literature to the contrary, it is not the case that the importance of caste voting has declined.

Far from it, for the drive to garner benefits of all sorts, available from state agencies, on the part of caste groups, and the increased capture of state power by leaders from castes newly incorporated into the political process, has been so central to the politicization of the Indian population that one scholar has characterized India as a “patronage democracy.”⁵ Although the term is one that applies to many states in the past as well as the contemporary world, its distinctive character in India is the extent to which it implies a high degree of cohesive voting on the part of particular caste groups for persons from their own caste, who alone can be relied on to accommodate their needs and demands.

Pakistan

Pakistan’s post-Independence political history has been markedly different from that of India. Whereas in India there was marked continuity of political leadership under Nehru—and even beyond under both Indira and Rajiv Gandhi—Pakistan lost both its founding leaders, Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan within a few years after Independence, the former through natural causes and the latter by assassination. Neither did the political parties have any substantial base in the electorate at Independence that would enable the firm establishment of parliamentary government or even, for that matter, the promulgation of a constitutional framework. In contrast to India, therefore, it is the military that has been the predominant political force in Pakistan since the initial displacement of the parliamentary regime by Ayub Khan in 1958.

A further profound difference between these two polities has been the deleterious influence of the United States that has repeatedly and disastrously influenced the course of Pakistani politics by supporting and feeding successive military regimes with massive “foreign aid,” most of it used by the military to fortify its armaments and wage wars against India over Kashmir. Moreover, latterly, the United States has been using the country as a reluctant ally in the fruitless war in Afghanistan. Neither has American intervention changed at all the primary focus of the Pakistan military towards confrontation with India.

At the same time, it deserves mention that in Pakistan, as everywhere else in South Asia, there is a mass base that rejects military rule and supports parliamentary government that has twice been decisive in altering the country’s history: the first time in the mass movement that led to the resignation of Ayub Khan in 1969 and the second occasion in 2007–08 that brought down the military regime of Pervez Musharaf and reinstituted civilian government. However, the crux of the problem of the failure of civilian rule in Pakistan, apart from the persisting virtual independence of the military from civilian control, has been, as Burki notes (Chapter 6), the inability of “the civilian leadership, when exercising power … to institutionalize the base of their support.”

Bangladesh

Like Pakistan, Bangladesh belongs in the category of a society in which aspirations for the establishment of a democratic political order based on free, competitive elections have remained, but have been repeatedly undermined by violent conflict, including assassinations of heads of state, repeated military takeovers, and deep hatreds between the leaders of the two principal contending parties, the surviving spouses of former assassinated heads of state. Aspirations for independence and democracy arose in Bangladesh initially during one of undivided Pakistan’s longest periods of military rule. The movement was crushed by the Pakistani army, but ultimately prevailed through the military intervention of India in 1971.

But none of the elected regimes in Bangladesh has lasted long. Even in the case of the country’s first leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who had nearly total electoral support, democratic rule did not prevail. Mired in corruption, soon losing respect and support while attempting to shore up his rule by building his own military force, Mujib and most members of his large family were finally slaughtered in 1975 during a military coup. However, one daughter was left alive, Sheikh Hasina, who was abroad at the time, and who ultimately matured into one of the principal contenders for power in Bangladesh politics up to the present day.

One of the leaders of the military coup, General Ziaur Rahman, emerged at the head of a new military regime, which lasted only until his own assassination in 1981. Since the killing of Sheikh Mujib and General Zia, it can be fairly said that politics in Bangladesh has been a form of vendetta, in which Sheikh Hasina, Zia’s wife, Khaleda, and successive military leaders have struggled for power and the support of the people of the country through a series of competitive elections, coups, countercoups, and military takeovers that have persisted up to the present. At the same time, these struggles have often involved the mobilization of large numbers of people from all walks of life in mass movements that continue to testify to the aspirations in Bangladesh society for popular government or, at least, for competitive elections and “civil liberties”(Harry Blair, in Chapter 7).

Indeed, one of the shared characteristics of political behavior in the three states that were formerly part of British-ruled India has been the centrality of mass mobilizations as vehicles for political change, transformation, and even overthrow of military regimes to reestablish elections as the proper mode of achieving the power to rule. It is a curiosity, however, of Bangladesh politics that, although elections are considered the only valid means of attaining power, the losers invariably cry foul, insisting that the elections were marred by fraud or even rigged, often protesting the results by a return to the streets, as Blair puts it. Moreover, no matter which party wins power, the winner takes all the spoils that include especially the corrupt income and the control over the police to protec...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Abbreviations
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Colonialism, Nationalism, and Independence in South Asia
• Part II Political change, political parties, and the issue of unitary vs federal forms of government
• Part III The judiciary
• Part IV Pluralism and national integration
• Part V Crises of national unity
• Part VI Political economy
• Part VII Comparative chapters
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index